


Do You Remember

by Setcheti



Series: Clint Barton: Witch Hunter [1]
Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Explicit Language, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-01-27
Packaged: 2017-11-27 05:17:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/658400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Setcheti/pseuds/Setcheti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The battle is over and Loki is secured, but Clint Barton still has one more thing to take care of. He just hopes that Steve remembers...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do You Remember

**Author's Note:**

> I saw Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters the day after it opened, and it was AWESOME. So I came home and promptly started writing fic - not like they're going to be making any more of them, which could be good or bad depending on how you look at it. There will be more of this coming, because it has already created its own fic-universe in my head where all kinds of terrible and wonderful things are happening.

They had secured Loki. They had eaten shawarma. They had all gone back to what was left of Stark Tower and looked for more alien invaders. And then they had secured the upper floors of Stark Tower, decided who was going to be on watch – Jarvis, Tony’s AI, had ended up with that duty by virtue of not being able to be influenced by Loki  – and everyone had gone to shower and try to find a place to sleep, definitely in that order. Bruce Banner had trotted around with Tony’s first aid kit to make sure everyone was all right, after the showers and before the sleeping, and then he’d gone to bed too.

Pepper had shown up a few hours later, and everyone had been startled out of sleep by her yelling at Tony, who probably shouldn’t have defended himself by saying that he had, in fact, tried to call her before leaving the planet but she hadn’t picked up her phone. She cried on him and he apologized profusely for almost getting killed saving the city, and everyone else went back to bed.

Everyone except Clint Barton, that was. He was supposed to be sleeping, he knew he needed it, but first there was something else he knew he needed to take care of so it didn’t bite him on the ass later. So he made his way through the damaged building to the room Steve Rogers had camped out in, stopping outside the door and just standing there. He knew he didn’t need to knock. “You awake?” he asked softly.

There was a pause that wasn’t the silence of a sleeping person, and then the supersoldier’s tired voice admitted, “Yeah, come on in.” Clint pushed open the door and stuck his head in. “You okay?”

“I’m okay enough.” Clint quirked a smile when Steve scooted down the couch he was sitting on to make room for him. He closed the door and then took a seat, looking into those tired blue eyes and finding what he’d hoped he would. “I was hoping your brains weren’t so freezer-burned you wouldn’t remember me.”

Steve shook his head. “I was pretty shocked to see you when I opened the door to that room on the Helicarrier, let me tell you. But I didn’t want to say anything, just in case SHIELD didn’t know.”

“They don’t, I’m not that stupid. Natasha doesn’t even know.” Clint sat back. “I didn’t even tell them about the sugar until I had to – and then I told Phil and let Phil explain it to the rest of SHIELD. They think someone was experimenting on me when I was a kid, trying to find a cure for diabetes.”

“They aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are,” Steve observed. “Which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing, considering what almost happened earlier.”

Clint snorted. “No, them being fallible’s a good thing, definitely – and they’re a lot more fallible now that Stark’s got their number. They’ll have to bury their secrets pretty damn deep to keep him from finding them.”

“That is a good thing. I don’t like the way the files they have on him read.” Steve shifted, trying to get comfortable. “And I don’t like the way their people talk about him – or to him – either. Fury’s whole melodramatic act on the bridge with Agent Coulson’s cards…he knows that was Loki making everyone fight, he knew it then. It was all I could do to sit there and let him get away with it. I did my best to pull Stark out of it afterwards, though.”

“Is that why he was walkin’ on eggshells around you earlier?”

This time Steve was the one who snorted. “No. At least, I don’t think so.” He sighed. “Do you know anything about what happened to Howard after I…after I died? Because I swear, if he’s the reason his kid is so touchy and twitchy, I’m digging the bastard up and setting what’s left of him on fire.” 

“I know he helped set up SHIELD,” Clint told him. “And then he turned into a drunk. No idea if he was a mean drunk or not…but you know, from some of what Nat has said about Tony? I’m guessing mean drunk may have only been the beginning.” He leaned forward when the other man grimaced. “Steve, that’s not your fault – you were fucking dead, remember? And high-strung guys like Howard…well, you know how they go. The war was the guy’s shining moment, everything else must have been all downhill from there as far as he was concerned.”

“I know – doesn’t mean I have to like it.” Steve let his head drop against the back of the couch. “I need to call Peggy. I wasn’t going to, but after today I’m pretty sure she’s going to find out that I’m back one way or the other. She should hear it from me.”

That startled Clint. “She’s still alive?”

“They gave me papers on pretty much everyone I worked closely with during the war, she’s the only one left.” Steve quirked a smile of his own. “Other than you, of course. It was damn good to see a face I knew I could trust, finally.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll be around approximately as long as you will, assuming our new job doesn’t get us both killed. We can watch each other’s backs from here on out.” Clint let his head drop back too, then grimaced and lifted his head right back up. “This couch is fucking hard, Steve. Are you really planning to sleep on this?”

“No, I was going to bed down on the floor, actually – that’s where I was before Pepper showed up. You?”

“Nat found a bed, we think it must be a guest room, or maybe it’s where Pepper stays when she’s not sleeping with Stark. Don’t know and don’t really care, it’s a bed.” He forced himself up off the couch with a groan, then reached down and tugged on Steve’s arm. “Come on, sleeping on the floor is somethin’ you do when you don’t have another option. You can share with us – this bed is obscenely huge, there’s plenty of room.”

Blue eyes blinked at him. “What will Natasha think about that?”

Clint snorted. “We’re not together that way. She’ll think the same thing she always thinks, that I’m tragically impulsive but unfortunately usually right. And then she’ll warn you that if you grope she’ll gut you.”

Steve let himself be pulled up, scooping up his shield with his free hand. “Not that I’d do it anyway…but that probably wouldn’t kill me. She’ll have to think of a better threat.”

“This is Natasha Romanov we’re talkin’ about, she’ll take that as a challenge.”

Steve laughed. “Yeah, probably. It’ll take her mind off fighting aliens for the night, though.”

Clint laughed as well, clapping him on the shoulder. “You’ve still got it, Cap.”

“I hope so, since it seems like I’m going to be needing it. Somehow I don’t think aliens attacking the city was a one-time thing.” He pulled the shorter man into a one-armed hug. “I am so damned glad you’re here, Han.”

“And I’m so damned glad you remembered me, Steve.” Clint returned the hug, then wiggled out of it and herded him out of the room. “Come on, bedtime. We’ll have to deal with all kinds of bullshit tomorrow, it’ll go better over a good night’s sleep.”

“Right as usual.” Steve followed the other man down the debris-littered hallway, covering a yawn with his hand. “Tomorrow, once we’re all up, remind me to ask Stark if he’s got a phone I can borrow to call England…”

  
Jarvis determined that the important part of the conversation Agent Barton and Captain Rogers were having was over and stopped recording, then scanned the AV file to determine where to save it. The algorithm sir had created for this purpose calculated word strength and tone, cross-matched proper names which had been used, and then produced a number which indicated whether the file should be secured or not. This particular file ranked fairly high on the scale, so Jarvis locked it down and added it to sir’s private information archive. He then initiated a second scan, linking the file to relevant dossiers and, in one instance, to an entry in one of Howard Stark’s journals. The journal entry made the AI pause, however; a name related to the one he had linked had been used, so he did a quick search for more information, found said information, and ran another importance-ranking algorithm. This one resulted in a data-irregularity error, which caused Jarvis to lock down the file and all of the links again and red-flag them in the system until sir could examine them himself. Determining whether or not the irregularity was resolvable or not was beyond Jarvis’s capabilities at the moment, as he was devoting most of his currently damage-limited attention to monitoring Loki so that sir and the others could sleep.

  
Loki, who had been sleeping himself, woke with a gasp and sat up, cradling his aching head in his bound hands, and decided he would just try not to go back to sleep again for a while. He’d been asleep twice already, and each time he’d dreamed about a dark-haired woman in leather pants taking great pleasure in torturing him while insisting that he really shouldn’t have hurt her brother.

The fact that he could no longer remember who her brother was, although he knew he should be able to, scared him more than he was ever going to admit. Because humans weren’t supposed to possess that kind of magic anymore, or so he’d always been told. Apparently, someone had told him wrong…


End file.
